Scrolls were illegible for 2,000 years. A college student read one with AI. [View all]

[Nittersing]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/10/17/herculaneum-scrolls-contest-translated-deciphered/

This is pretty cool.

A University of Nebraska-Lincoln student was at a party in August when he received a text that would help him decipher a nearly 2,000-year-old message.

In the previous few months, Luke Farritor had joined a worldwide competition to translate ancient Roman scrolls that were damaged by a volcanic eruption in A.D. 79. The 21-year-old computer science major had developed an artificial intelligence program to detect the charred Greek letters written on papyrus.

The text message he received at the party included an image from one of the scrolls. Farritor sat down in a corner to review the picture and uploaded it to his AI program before returning to the party. When he was walking back to his dorm room around 1 a.m., Farritor pulled out his phone from his pocket and was shocked at what he saw.

His AI program had detected about a dozen letters from the image.

“I was completely amazed,” Farritor told The Washington Post. “I freaked out a little bit, jumping up and down, yelling, screaming.”